Recovering Eden

I am taking a break for a short season in order to complete my manuscript for Recovering Eden: The Gospel in the Book of Ecclesiastes to be soon published by P&R.

Why Pastors Need the Local Flavor of the Bible

I forget how local the Bible is.  But when I read that Jeremiah was the son of Hilkiah who was one of the priests of Anathoth, (Jer. 1:1) or when I hear the poet express his romantic love by saying, “Your hair is like a flock of goats leaping down the slopes of Gilead,” (Song 4:1) or when John tells us that “there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades,”(Jn. 5:2),  my memory recovers.

Learning a God Intended Locality

I am reminded that the Bible was written by local preachers, regional poets and neighborhood scribes regarding those parts of creation, providence and redemption that paraded down the streets of their own towns within the shadows of their own mountains, and with the speech of languages that are foreign to my own. God intentionally communicated Himself in this way. As a Missourian from Indiana who speaks English I am meant to consider not just the slopes of Rock Hill or of Floyd’s Knobs, but of a Hebrew speaking person and his scenic views of Gilead. By doing so, a phrase from the late novelist, Flannery O’Conner, comes to mind. I borrow it for this context and I think that in the Bible God teaches me the “possibility of reading a small history in a universal light.” (Mystery and Manners, 58) Small, not in the sense of worth, but in the sense of a local geography. Within all its particular limits, weathers, supper times and doings, God does a universal thing. I’m starting to think therefore that when I fail to remember this local flavor of the Bible, my ability to carry out  my pastoral vocation begins to suffer. I need the Spirit of Jesus to illumine and recover me. At least three reasons come to mind.

 1. What if God intended the local flavor of the Bible to graciously apprentice us in double-love? How genius! God has built the sum of the Law into the very way He has communicated Himself to us by this Word. After all, the  Bible forces me to care about cultures, times, customs, hills, lakes, ways of life, and personal histories that are other than my own. I have to esteem others better than myself, I have to humble myself, be initially quiet about my own ways, and patiently learn just to enter the Bible. Likewise, I cannot escape the reality that God is carrying out His purposes among neighbors whose yards, surnames, vocabularies, and skin-tones do not resemble mine. I have to learn to love Him and His care for other peoples and places. When we say in seminary that when we study the Bible “context is king,” we are actually saying that “neighbor love and attention to their locality” is paramount. And we are saying that God has made it so if I am to hear from Him and know Him. As I surrender to the local flavor of the Scriptures, my daily pastoral work is re-centered upon loving people wherever they are found and loving the God who is there with them in their locality.

2. What if God intended the local flavor of the Bible to show us His way and therefore our path? Isaiah did not deny or hide the fact that his Dad was Amoz. Nor did he exaggerate his role. He let us know his limits of place. He served in Judah and Jerusalem under the reign of certain local kings and not others. (Is. 1:1) I am no prophet. But as a pastor I am Zack the son of Vern who serves in Webster Groves, Missouri during the reigns of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama. If I write in this blog about Lockwood, North Webster, Llewellyns or Steger, I risk losing some of you, and therefore of losing my sense of making a large difference in my generation. And yet, as much as I may desire my influence to announce names like world-wide, big city or best practice farm, my daily vocation and faithfulness will suffer if I do not attend to the street Lockwood, to the people and issues of North Webster where I live, to local gathering places like Llewellyns, or to the sixth grade school called Steger just a couple of blocks from my rented house. Prophets, priest, kings, sages and apostles gave themselves, even as our Lord did fully, to their local names and times.  I too recover my purpose to get on with global things by paying attention to Jesus for the businessman in Old Webster, or with regard to the hail that banged and fought against my window in the dark morning here in Webster Groves or to the food pantry in Webster/Rock Hill for those here who need. Small histories in the hands of God do more than we know. This is God’s way. The local flavor of the Bible reminds me of my path.

3. What if God intended the local flavor of the Bible to distinguish vibrant community from provincialism? Gentiles are grafted in. Every tribe and tongue and nation bows. Dividing walls are broken down. Jonah must go to Nineveh. Paul who loves his own people more than his own life has a purpose for a people who are not his own. The local flavor of the Bible, does not approve of provincialism nor does it stifle mission. The temptation of those who give themselves to a locality is to pay no mind to those “outside” and assume that those “inside” are better, smarter, faster. The gospel frees us toward locality and from idolatry of place. In Jesus, the Bible apprentices us. Well, I need to go meet with a man on West Kirkham (also known at that corner as South Brentwood). My global purpose awaits!

Trying to find a pastoral way of life

“We learned how he lived.” Reading these words gave me pause. They were written by the famed poet, Donald Hall. Donald wrote these words about his pastor. (Life Work, 6) His pastor’s name was Jack.

The words gave me pause because I had never heard of Jack or the small New Hampshire church that he pastored for years until he died. Unknown to the world and flawed he was nonetheless known by Donald and his wife Jane and a small community of people who came to follow Jesus. “Unknown to the world.” “Hmmm,” I ponder. “This fact is never a good measure of a pastor’s worth or place. Known by God. Known by those he served and loved where he was called. These, more local and mundane relationships and labors are truer measures of the pastor, the man, the call,” I think to myself.

The words also gave me pause as Scripture words plunge and splash into the pond of my thoughts.  ”Remember your leaders . . .consider the outcome of their way of life . . .imitate their faith.” (Hebrews 13:7) “A pastor’s way of doing a day is meant for apprenticeship,” I think to myself. “My way of life is supposed to promote thought and to invite imitation among those I learn to serve and love in Jesus.” Pastoral ministry is a vocation of apprenticeship in a way of life.

At this point, Anxiety began to pound its fists upon the door of my pause. “But I live a split life” I protest. The “way of life” that people encounter with me is public and oriented toward the strengths and surfaces of my days. People have my strengths to imitate: I preach Sunday, I teach on a weekday morning, I answer questions or offer counsel in my study, I lead monthly leadership meetings. People have my surfaces to imitate: how I smile or don’t, the music or movie I listen to or don’t, the way I hold my wife’s hand or don’t, the way my kids behave or don’t in the hallway after the service. “But these are moments of public doing, not personal and daily ways of being, not daily rhythms for doing a sustained life,” I counter within myself. “Is it just my moments of strength and surface that are meant to promote reflection and imitation among those I pastor?,” I ask. “Surely it isn’t less, but what about my daily weaknesses and depths?” “But people don’t want or respect a pastor’s weaknesses, ordinary rhythms or personal depths,” I counter. “To invite them there is to drop church attendance or to invite pain,” I say. “But what if people respond this way because they’ve been poorly apprenticed?”

At this point, frustration and self-righteousness crash into my pause. “What about me?!” I shout almost out loud. “How can I serve as an apprentice in a way of doing life if the pastors and leaders I’ve had offered their strength and surface, their pulpit and their handshake, as the thing I’m supposed to imitate and strive to make a norm?” “No wonder I’m hollowed out, emphasizing and chasing strengths and surfaces as a way of doing pastoral ministry! This is the normal model!”

A sense of quitting now joins the crowd of thoughts and questions and self righteousness that have infiltrated my pause. Somehow Paul offered those he served not only his teachings, but his patience, his sufferings, his daily life and his daily way of doing work for their view and imitation. (2 Tim. 3:10-11; 2 Thess. 3:7) “It had to be grace right?” I ask. “I mean, the One who let the disciples live with him and then said at the end, “love as I have loved you;” this One offers more than strength and surface for us to learn how a day can be inhabited, right?”  ”Jesus paid and purchased this kind of apprenticeship for pastors and people at the cross and by His grace didn’t He provide this for us?” But what will it mean if I start to order my day in such a way that I account for more than strengths and surfaces? What will it mean if I view, not just my public performances, but my daily ways of doing life as an open book for imitation?

I will freak out and enter a kind of detox for a while. Yep. I will lose some church attendance too perhaps. For many of us, giving not only the gospel but our very lives; teaching not only by offering information but also by invitation into relationally and actually practicing the work itself, is a foreign category. Since surface and strength is what we’ve been apprenticed in, some of us won’t know how to recognize the gospel health of weakness and depth that is being offered to us. Slow, steady, authentic, incomplete, imperfect, spiritual practice amid the actual alteration of the way we approach a day isn’t sexy, quick, or noticeable. It fidgets us and there is a church down the street that likely won’t require of us this discomfort of health. I will grow, so will others and so will the way pastors pursue their vocation. But those who stay and who want to learn a way of life . . . consider its outcome . . . and imitate it, will encounter a way of life with Jesus that they never knew existed beyond the strengths and surfaces.

In order to move toward this idea of apprenticeship and imitation as a pastoral way of life, I think I’ll have to reconsider the way I currently structure a day and the way I teach,” I say to myself. “What does that look like?” I think I’ll try to begin to address that in my next couple of posts. There is a lot here to think out and learn. What do you think?

Life, ministry and “wasting time.” HELP!

I’ve become confused about what it means to waste time. This confusion is making a mess out of my ability to do life as a human being, as a family man and as a pastor. To waste time means that we squander what we’ve been given. Careless with seconds we prove inefficient through misuse of minutes.

Clock-Time Anxiety and Guilt

And this, I think is where my agitation begins. I find that I habitually measure waste by the ticking of a clock. Too many clicks and anxiety pounds upon my door demanding to be let in. Guilt sees me driving too slow. Highways are made for fast transit so guilt bangs on its horn. It tailgates me. It rolls down its window, gives me the finger and hollers, “Get off the road you %*# turtle!” Speedy completion equals well used time. Slow completion equals misuse and waste. Being on the move equals making progress. Busyness is focus. Slow advance is distraction.

Don’t get me wrong. Getting things done fast by using a hasty deadline-frenzy to motivate us makes sense when the task before us involves making sales calls, or changing diapers, or getting to surgery in the ER. Likewise, we have to “get a move on” as my people used to say, when getting the cows in, or staining the deck, or completing a building project, or finishing our homework. Waiting too long before getting a sleeping bag to the homeless in winter, or before mobilizing a swat team in crisis or before rousing a battle squadron amid ambush can have fatal consequences.  Act too slowly to roll up your car windows and the afternoon rains will soak your seats.

I Want to Get There Quickly

But right here a dilemma confronts me. Moral, psychological, physical, vocational and relational growth, by their very nature, often require massive quantities of time. This is where my confusion comes in. As a human being, unless I’m a prodigy, learning the piano is going to take years of awkward mistakes and uncomfortable practice. When we say “I do” at the altar with our spouse this does not mean that “we are done.” The trust required to say “I do” is substantial. But things await us in life that will require that our trust grows even deeper. Growing trust rarely happens hastily. If I ask my eight year old to carry the container of juice boxes from the car into the house its all good, but physically he isn’t able yet to carry the sound system speakers for worship-team set-up on Sunday morning. Not because there is something wrong with him but because there is something right. He has to be eight before he can be twelve. Likewise, my first sermon can make a huge difference in God’s hands, but that doesn’t mean that I can apply the Scriptures the way a pastor of twenty five years can. And just because I can start ministry programs and build a church building in two years does not mean that the spiritual growth of the congregation (or our own spiritual maturing) will go at the same speed.

Haste and the Pastorate Cannot Co-exist

I’m trying to say that most of what I do as a person, a family man, and as a pastor, involves entering the kinds of things that require years and lifetimes to complete. The nature of love, growth, sanctification, thought and skill requires that I give hospitable room to the time commitments these worthy depths require of us. When I try to apply clock-time measures of waste to these slow-advancing treasures I get flustered, I impatiently pressure others, I feel like a failure and incompetent.I quit way too soon. Speedy measures of accomplishment cannot mentor us in the skills of waiting, persevering and longsuffering. Without these skills we will rarely experience the abiding joys and satisfactions that only a long labor can produce.

Many of those in our congregation can do their jobs with the motto, “Speed equals value and success.” But the nature of what we are called to do as pastors will require us to throw this motto out. It cannot work for us. Human beings simply do not grow in their love for God and each other in this way. And no matter what our job is, it is a damaging thing to translate this motto into the way we make a home and make love with our spouses, the way we parent our kids, or the way we personally relate from our hearts to God. Maybe we’ve been giving up too soon on weighty things because we’ve tried to use haste as our means of accruing weightiness. A life or ministry of substance cannot happen quickly. Dear friend, using your days to give people the hospitable room that their growth with Jesus and each other will require, is no waste of time! It is a noble way to spend a life. 

Do Not Be Discouraged

With this in mind, I’d like to share an old story with you. It is told by an old hermit.

A man had a plot of land. Through his carelessness, brambles sprang up and it became a wilderness of thistles and thorns. Then he decided to cultivate it. So he said to his son, “go and clear that ground.”

So, the son went to clear it and saw that the thorns and thistles had multiplied. So, his resolve weakened and he said, “What alot of time I should need to clear and weed all this.” So he lay down and went to sleep. He did this day after day.When his father came to see what he had done he found him doing nothing. He said to him, “Why have you done nothing until now?”

The boy said to his father, “I was coming to work father when I saw this wilderness of thorn and thistle and I was too intimidated to start and so I lay on the ground and went to sleep.” Then his father said to him, “Son if you had cleared each day the area on which you lay down, your work would have advanced slowly and you would not have lost heart.” So the boy followed his father’s advice and in a short time the plot was cultivated.

The hermit then spoke about the grace of God and added, “do a little work and do not be discouraged.” (The Desert Fathers, Penguin Classics, 72-73)

A Word for a New Pastor and Congregation

I recently gave the charge for a good friend as he was installed as a new pastor for a local congregation. Some have asked that I write it down. So, I’ve changed the name of my friend and of the congregation. But here is the gist of what I tried to say.

“As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man named Matthew.” (Matt. 9:9) 

For the Pastor

When Luke recounted this meeting between Jesus and Matthew, Luke focused on Matthew’s title and position in the community. “Jesus saw a tax collector,” Luke says.
Similarly, when Mark described this event, he focused on Matthew’s family line and relational connections. “Jesus saw Levi, Son of Alpheus,” Mark says.
But when Matthew describes the time that he and Jesus met, Matthew says something honest, humbling and freeing as he looks back on that moment. “Jesus saw a man,” Matthew tells us. “A man named Matthew.”

Dr. Freeman, my first encouragement for you on this sacred occasion is this: Long before you had the vocational title of pastor, or Reverend, or Reverend Doctor; Long before you were “in the know,” with relational connections, you were simply a man named John.  Our Lord heard your prayers not because you had a title or connections, but because you were a human being, an ordinary man, with a name that was known to Him and a life that mattered to Him. You were simply a man saved by grace whom Jesus loved. You still are. Jesus sees you as a human being.

For this reason, may I mention to you a second encouragement as a freeing reminder? Take heart dear friend that you needn’t repent when you cannot be everywhere at once. Find help in the reminder that you are not meant to feel shame and regret when you cannot fix everything. Feel encouraged to know that you needn’t smite yourself and cower without confidence on those occasions in which it is obvious that you do not know everything. After all, being omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient belongs to God. These characteristics always describe Him but they were never meant to describe you or any of us. Even the Corinthians or the Philippians had on occasion to go without Paul’s actual presence. They had to make due with a letter while he had to be somewhere else. So it is with you and with those whom you love and serve in Jesus’ name.

Some will want you to be God for them. You too might be tempted. They will applaud you when you try to be more than human and criticize you when you are nothing more. You might foolishly believe either and mistakenly pursue both. But this only reminds you why they and you both need a savior. Only Jesus can be everywhere at once for them and for you. Only Jesus can fix everything that any of us needs fixing. Only Jesus knows everything that our situations require. After all, beneath your titles and connections, you are really just a man named John. Trust that Jesus will apprentice others in how to handle their thoughts and emotions when they wish that you were more than human. Jesus will apprentice your thoughts and emotions too.

Here a third encouragement comes to mind. Consider the grace that a human being with an ordinary name can find in Jesus. Matthew, the man, the sinner, became a writer of the gospel. He became a preacher and a lover of people. Being ordinary and human never means that something good and precious cannot come from us. Quite the opposite, in Matthew’s story, we are reminded that you too, a man named John, needn’t labor in vain. What a marvelous purpose and dignity He has given you! You too by His grace can make a profound gospel difference for your ordinary neighbors in this local place.

For the Congregation

This leads us to consider those of us who are listening in. You each form the congregation of neighbors here at Grace Church that John will seek to love and do life with. May I suggest two things for you?

First, encourage John’s humanity. As a man, John is subject to the same temptations, joys and questions that any of us face in a life. He is a husband and a Dad. Each day is a mixture of storm and bloom. He will not always be at his best either through his own battles with sin or because of his having to feel and forgive those who have sinned against him. At other times, He will shine with the treasure within his clay jar, showing forth the evidences of grace and virtue that Jesus has purchased for him and worked in him. He will need the same prayers, encouragements, comforts, counsels and forgiveness that anyone else in your church family needs.

Remember, John has no superhero cape. He cannot be everywhere that you might want him to be, or to know everything when you might wish him to know it, or to fix everything the way you prefer in the timing you prioritize. Even a pastor is not Jesus and John is no exception. Like you, John is not the Christ. Like you he is a local human being. So, laugh together with him. Question with him. Cry with him. Eat with him. Pray with him. Celebrate with him. Look to Jesus with him. Seek Jesus to recover your humanity together.

Second, embrace and learn from John in his calling. As you remember John’s humanity do not forget His calling. Jesus has called John to pray with you, to look to Jesus with you, to open the Bible to you, and to walk through triumph and tragedy with you. He has gifts from God therefore that are uniquely suited to help you grow in your love for God and for your neighbors.

Moreover, John is a seasoned man and pastor. He has been a husband and a Dad and a pastor for quite a while now. He has God-learned wisdom from years of mistake-making, walking with others, traveling the country, working with churches, and taking stock of it all. When you remember that John is a human being do not forget that he nonetheless is a veteran pastor equipped by the Savior to strengthen you in your own calling and life.

With these two encouragements in mind, therefore, watch out for two temptations.
The first is that you so recognize John’s calling that you disregard his humanity and then painfully require of him those things that only Jesus can be and do. The second is to so recognize John’s humanity that you disrespect his calling and experience. When we do this, we prove ourselves arrogant or unteachable toward the place God is calling John to have in our lives.

So, now together, as a pastor and a congregation, you have the opportunity both in your humbled humanity and your purposeful callings to taste and see the goodness of the Lord as a family, a team. With each other, Jesus will show you a fruitful and meaningful life of love for His glory in this community. What a marvelous team the grace of Jesus will empower you to become! Human together, as a pastor and a people, the throne of the Savior’s grace and purpose awaits you.

The Benefits of Sorrow

“To be cast down is often the best thing that could happen to us.” (Charles Spurgeon)

It is rarely wise and often unkind to say what Spurgeon says while someone vomits from the chemo, showers off from bodily assault, exit interviews for their lost job, or weeps by the graveside of their child. In such moments, we learn from the best practice of Job’s friends. We say nothing. We sit in the ashes. We weep with those who weep. We talk more to God about them than we talk to them about God. We need not declare in these early horrid moments what grace and time in God’s hands can prove without our saying a word. So, we speak Spurgeon’s sentiment sparingly and in time, but nonetheless we learn to embody it daily. I say, “we learn to embody it” because we know full well that Spurgeon’s statement is not automatic. We know full well how sorrows can negatively change a person–it can harden us, embitter us, shatter our faith in God and make us cynical about people.

How then do we learn to embody a benefit to sorrow? Spurgeon points us to Jesus. Jesus is called, Immanuel, God with us. He is not, (as I often wish) the God who gives us immunity from the world or the God who gives freedom to choose only good things so that no neighbor ever chooses anything to harm another. Rather, God is the One who does not leave us when people, sicknesses, devils or the weather do their worst. Spurgeon therefore makes the healing claim: “There is no remedy for sorrow beneath the sun like the sorrows of Immanuel.” “The sympathy of Jesus is the next most precious thing to his sacrifice.”

Jesus speaks to our sorrows and orders them to serve His purposes. Sorrows are caused by ugly things. But Jesus adopts them as it were. He brings them into His own counsel. The One who loves even enemies, probations our sorrows. He gives them His own heart and provision and house. Living with Him they reform and take on His purposes to promote His intentions and to reverse and thwart foul tidings. In other words, sorrows belong to Jesus. He is their master no matter what fiendish thought gave them birth. With Jesus having authority over our sorrows in mind, Spurgeon identifies a handful of benefits recovered when Jesus boots with us and shovels out our pigpen muck.

• Sorrow teaches us to resist trite views of what maturity in Jesus looks like:  Faith is not frownless. Maturity is not painless. Disheveled and bedridden amid the jittery and unanswered; this is no necessary sign of wickedness. It is the presence of Jesus and not the absence of glee that designates the situation and provides our hope. Spurgeon says it this way. “Depression of spirit is no index of declining grace; the very loss of joy and the absence of assurance may be accompanied by the greatest advancement in the spiritual life . . . we do not want rain all the days of the week, and all the weeks of the year; but if the rain comes sometimes, it makes the fields fertile, and fills the waterbrooks.”

• “Sorrow exposes and roots out our pride: Perhaps we can think of it this way. When standing at a thrift sale, the saying goes, “One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.” We often mix-up what Jesus treasures with what Jesus willingly gets rid of. Sorrows show where we’ve been passing over His seemingly used treasures with eyes wide for brand new nothings.We are very apt to grow too big” Spurgeon says. ” It is a good thing for us to be taken down a notch or two. We sometimes rise too high, in our own estimation, that unless the Lord took away some of our joy, we should be utterly destroyed by pride.”

• Sorrow pushes us to take a second look at ourselves, to be more honest about ourselves and our situations: Sorrow unthreads the hem of our rationalizations. Spurgeon says, “When this downcasting comes, it gets us to work at self-examination . . . When your house has been made to shake, it has caused you to see whether it was founded upon a rock.”

• Sorrow is a means of drawing us closer to Jesus in truer dependence: As a child I watched a cartoon. It pictured a Coyote trying to catch a roadrunner. The Coyote used a saw to cut a circle hole out from underneath the Roadrunner’s feet. But when the hole was completed, it wasn’t the Roadrunner that fell. Rather, the rest of the floor crumbled down all around and upon the Coyote, leaving the Roadrunner held and fixed in the air; his feet still standing upon his piece of floor.  Jesus stays put though everything else fall around us. Strength emerges. Spurgeon says it this way, “When  you and I were little boys, and we were out at eventide walking with our father, we used sometimes to run on a long way ahead; but, by-and-by, there was a big dog loose on the road, and it is astonishing how closely we clung to our father then.”

• Sorrow teaches us empathy for one another: “If we had never been in trouble ourselves, we should be very poor comforters of others . . . It would be no disadvantage to a surgeon if he once knew what it was to have a broken bone; you may depend upon it that his touch would be more tender afterwords; he would not be so rough with his patients as he might have been if he had never felt such pain himself.” Jesus shows us his wounds, the slanders, the manipulations, the injustices, the body blows, the mistreatments piled onto Him.  From there He loves, still. He invites us into fellowship with His empathy. We receive it from Him in the deeps. Rarely quickly but often truly, we rise again and actually give, maybe for the first time in our lives.

(See Spurgeon’s sermons, The Man of Sorrows and Sweet Stimulants for the Fainting Soul)

Spurgeon’s Spooks

When trauma finally leaves us its memory stays to haunt us. Here, ministers have no immunity pass. We too must tread the creaked floors. We too suffer nightmares that shriek and push their way into noon. Day-dreams can shiver muscle and bone. Flashback can dizzy us. These ghosts and chains clank and howl with no sense of propriety. They care little that we stand with a bible in our hands, a sermon on our lips, or a prayer upon our breath. A nuisance, they never tire to remind that though Jesus never breaks down, spiritual giants do. Foul remembrances can spook even the gritty and most valiant among us.

Charles Spurgeon was twenty-two, in the tenth month of marriage, and the first month of parenting. Standing at a pulpit, preaching to seven thousand, someone yelled, “Fire!” The resulting panic left seven dead and twenty-eight seriously injured. He was in his words, mentally ‘unmanned.’ His critics were publically merciless. Twenty-five years later, preaching for a vast crowd, the sweat and anxiety suddenly overcame him so that he “felt quite unable to preach.” Leaning his head on his hand, the terrible scenes of years before flashed into his mind. “He could not entirely recover from the agitation.” All of his life and ministry the event intruded into him. How about you? What events can you not shake?

Throughout the Apostle Peter’s life roosters crowed. How long before the sound became bearable again? When the Apostle John heard carpenters pounding nails into wood, how long before the racket no longer unhinged him? I do not know. I only know that with medical personnel racing around the worship grounds amid groans and screams Spurgeon’s sense of his own strengths shattered. Five weeks later when he entered the pulpit again for the first time, he was not the same man. His humanity exposed. Need for Jesus clarified. It can be argued that in many ways the empowerment of his ministry was about to grow.

What can we learn from this?

• Some providences shake us to the core. They intrude into our skin with prickled and tingly disturbances. They steal oxygen and press shortness of breath into our lungs. This does not disqualify us. It proves what we preach—that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, not us.

• Sometimes pastors cannot leave the trauma scene. After all, sometimes the scene is the church itself. Members leave easily when hurt. Why can’t we? But Jesus intends to teach us how to talk about such things to Him and to entrust these pains to him. Moving too quickly gives temporal relief but leaves us still unskilled in this thing with which Jesus wants to empower us.

• Jesus interprets our life and calling, not our critics. Some lied about Spurgeon, slandered him in the community, left his church. Keeping us put, Jesus apprentices us in fellowship with Him. He teaches us how to live with uncorrected and incorrect reports about us so that we can get on with the gospel in the place nonetheless.

• Sometimes we cannot hide the help we need. We can no longer pretend that we are not like others—we too are human and need the graces of God in Jesus. Our reputations as someone who is more than human need to crash.

• Those ready to learn humanity and dependence will not leave you. Some left Spurgeon. His human weakness exposed theirs. But for those who stayed Spurgeon’s story became theirs. Theirs became his. The affection that grew between Spurgeon and the Tabernacle is now a testimony of profound grace in history.

Spooked? Yes. Misused? Absolutely. But disqualified because sometimes traumas reveal our human limits? Abandoned because hard-hearted critics say we are? Powerless in the gospel because life has “unmanned” us? Never!

The Pastor’s Pains and Comforts

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift.” (Mary Oliver)

Pain sits like a sewage that has backed up into our basements or like a river overflowing its banks into our fields and pushing toward our homes.  In such cases, no matter what else we do that day the waters of stench or torrent will have to be dealt with. And yet, maybe these two water analogies don’t quite help us. For they both imply a crisis occasion.

But pain isn’t always a crisis occasion. Sometimes pain is like the air we breath or our arthritic fingers. We learn to open the pickle jar or turn the faucet each day with wince. In other words, as the old adage goes, “Pain is a part of life.” As such, pain forms part of the landscape of pastoral ministry. Pastors enter a life of pains. By this I do not mean that life is only pain. Gladness of soul, simple pleasure, laughters of goodness saturate our days like the steady Spring rains. The flowers bloom.

But the one who has an aversion to pain along with an unwillingness to learn its ways and enter its territories will truly struggle as a pastor. Surely Job’s friends, the older brother, and the clergy who would not do for the beaten man what the Samaritan did, have all testified to this truth. I do not like this fact, but while heaven waits, pain is given parole. Sometimes our weary exhaustion in life and ministry comes solely and simply from the sorrows. (Lk. 22:45) We sorrow over at least two kinds of pains in life and therefore in ministry: “pains for” and “pains from.”

• Pain for our families: “and seeing him he fell at his feet . . .” (Mk. 5:22)
• Pain for our neighbors and churches: “There is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.” (2 Corinthians 11:28)
• Pain for our fellow ministers: “lest I should have sorrow upon sorrow.” (Phil. 2:27)

• Pain from personal sin: “sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” (I Tim. 1:15)
• Pain from limits and unanswered prayers: “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me.” (2 Cor. 12:8)
• Pain from our bodies: ” . . . for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.” (I Tim. 5:23)
• Pain from our families: “And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, ‘He is out of his mind.’” (Mk. 3:21)
• Pain from church members: “Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm…” (2 Tim. 4:14)
• Pain from fellow pastors: “Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry.” (Phil. 1:15) “And there arose a sharp disagreement so that they separated from each other.” (Acts 15:39)
• Pain from neighbors: “An attempt was made by both Jews and Gentiles, with their leaders, to mistreat them . . .” (Acts 14:5)

How do we enter a vocation that does not shy away from pain, but learns how to grieve it, to enter it, and to walk with others or at times alone, through it? The man of sorrows invites us to an apprenticeship. In fits and starts, through many toils and snares, with multiple nights prostrate on the floor of our pillowed tears, we learn from Him to say with Paul things like this.

“our bodies had no rest, we were afflicted at every turn, fighting without and fear within–But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us . . .” (2 Cor. 7:5-6)

“At my first defense no one came to stand by me but all deserted me. May it not be charged against them! . . . but the Lord stood by me and strengthened me.” (2 Tim. 4:16)

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of all mercies and the Father of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” (2 Cor. 1:3-4)

Dear weary friend. Jesus intends to comfort you in all of these pains for and pains from. The process is sure but not quick. He is your way forward. Do not lose heart. There are gifts in this darkness. Graces in this ruin. A tomb for this cross. A tomb that cannot keep you hemmed in. A tomb from which in Jesus we rise and the bones once broken begin to dance again–the dust in which we once laid. Somehow in prison with chains and stripes on our backs, we enter the story of Paul and we too because of Jesus begin to sing. Who but Jesus can confound pain so thoroughly? Who but Jesus can comfort so truly?

When Pastors Feel Overlooked

“With him we are sending the brother who is famous among all the churches for his preaching of the gospel.” (2 Corinthians 8:18)

Most of us who serve all of our lives in ministry will not be asked to speak at a conference or write a book or give a radio interview. For the majority of us, our ministries are a long obscurity among the local and unheard of. In a celebrity and consumer oriented church culture this fact can take its toll on a pastor. We wear down as the autograph lines always form outside another’s door and never our own. It is no wonder that amid these cultural pressures even Jesus preachers can be tempted to use their ministries as a means to compete with and outshine others. (Phil. 1:17). The thought of an overlooked life knocks the wind out. Maybe this is why I come back to these sentences of Paul.

After all, when Apollos preached the place was packed. But when Paul came to preach some people slept in. Seats were left vacant. It was hard to find enough volunteers for the nursery on the mornings Paul preached. The apostle’s pulpit presence was simply unimpressive. Closeness to God and measures of generational relevance were tied to the towers of oratory, spectacular influence and gathered crowds. Why bear with Paul when you could go down the street as it were and hear Apollos?

And now, with these words, Paul reveals that there is yet another preacher more impressive in the eyes of the congregations than Paul. It is almost like when the churches of that generation held a conference this famous brother would have likely been the keynote preacher, Apollos would have preached prime-time on the alternating nights, and Paul would have given a workshop or break-out session. But what some believers overlooked in Paul at times, Jesus saw clearly.

And what about Titus? It sounds rather humbling when we re-read the sentence. “With him,” (that is, “with Titus,”) we are sending the brother who is famous among all the churches.” Titus was perceived by many as a lesser pastor all of his life. When he was with Paul people would have thrown their attention to Paul first, not Titus. When Titus was with this famous preacher or in the vicinity of Apollos, they and not Titus would likely get the first invites for interviews. Titus had years of experience in the ministry-trenches of Jerusalem, Corinth, Dalmatia and Crete. He had a great deal to offer. But in these Corinthian circles it was often others they would naturally prefer for their bible and missions conferences. Corinthian Christians tended to overlook the non-sexy daily love of a man’s character toward them. They seemed to forget that part when talking about the best sermons. What some believers overlooked in Titus at times, Jesus saw fully.

The irony here is that those the Corinthians tended to prize are relatively unknown to us today (Apollos and the famous one). While those the Corinthians tended to overlook are in Jesus our sure guides today (Paul and Titus).  ”What then is Apollos? What then is Paul?” “Servants . . . as the Lord assigned . . . neither is anything . . . but only God who gives the growth.” (I Cor. 3:5-8)

So, by grace, we don’t let the celebrity opportunities that pass us by or never come, break us. Likewise, saturated in the grace of Jesus, we learn to discern that living a known life doesn’t necessarily equal having the kind of influence Jesus values. By grace then we don’t let the celebrity opportunities that come our way fool us either.

Questions rise. “If, for all of your labors and gifts and efforts for the gospel, you will remain unknown in your generation, why serve at all?” “Are you being tempted to give the Corinthian “over-look” to the unknowns or unimpressives? “Are you being tempted to believe that if you don’t matter to everybody you matter to nobody?” “Or because you matter to some you matter to everybody?” “Are you starting to believe that the praise or disrespect of some is synonymous with God’s view of you?”  Obscurity tempts us to believe that no celebrity equals no lasting influence.  Celebrity tempts us to believe that no obscurity means lasting influence. What if Paul provided more grace in this statement than we first realized? “Timothy,” he said. Preach the word in the sight of God.(2 Tim. 4:1) Oh, the gracious eyes! The present presence! No pastor in Jesus goes unnoticed. None are unheard of. Our obscurity is His table. Our celebrity is His place of humbling prayer. There we sup with Him day by day.

Being “Rude” with our Bodies

“Love is not rude.” (I Corinthians 13:5)

Rude behavior certainly may include breaches of etiquette, the way kids negatively talk back to their parents, or the way highway drivers misuse their fingers and lanes with each other, but for the Apostle Paul, to be “rude” (ESV) is particularly to step out of bounds bodily with another person; it is to misuse the skin or nakedness of a neighbor (or our own). Notice how Paul uses this greek word. (askimwn)

I Corinthians 7:36, Of heterosexual bodily temptation, Paul says, “if anyone thinks he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, . . .”

I Corinthians 12:23, When using a metaphor to suggest that all of us in Jesus belong to one another and have a role to play, he says, “our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty . . .” referring to those so called, “private parts” of our bodies that we cover with our clothes.

I Corinthians 13:5, “love is not rude.”

Romans 1:27, Now referring to homosexual bodily temptation, Paul describes, “men committing shameless acts with men . . .”

Revelation 16:15, Jesus uses a metaphor to describe our being ready for his sudden return. “Blessed is the one who stays awake keeping his garments on, that he may not go about naked and be seen exposed.”

The english words, “not behaving properly,” “unpresentable parts,” “rude,” “shameless acts,” and being seen “exposed” in our nakedness each refer to the same greek word. Each use describes an exposed bodily or sexually “out of bounds” context. Paul says that our church can have great preaching, robust theology, massive faith and genuine sacrifice (13:1-3), but if we are a people without love; in this case, if we are a people who misuse or consume or get out of line with each other’s bodies, we are irrelevant and just making religious noise in our culture. No wonder the misuse of bodies by authorities with children or the affairs and sexual scandals of our churches, rouses the indignant of the watching world. Instinctively they know what Paul is saying. The church, the community of Jesus, is meant to be the one community in the world in which a woman or a man or a child can dwell safe and free from predatory touch, consuming eyes, or the loveless agreement two people make in a “hook up.” It is like both persons agree that what they are about to do has nothing of love in it. They agree to submit to being unloved for the promise of a trinket moment.

Love delivers us from such things. The grace of Jesus is recovering us from bodily misuse. Jesus has never been rude to you, never misused your body, and never affirmed your misuse of another’s body. Jesus never crosses bounds with our nakedness. By doing so, our bodies are safe in his presence. For the first time in our lives we begin to feel how true love treats our skin.

For more listen to “Love is not Rude” at www.riversidestl.org, click on “sermons.”